The Not-So Favorite Son of Santa Barbara

It’s likely a first: A politician wins a statewide election, but is rejected by the people who presumably know him best--the voters of his own community.

Amazed, I came to Santa Barbara to ask why Rep. Michael Huffington couldn’t carry his own county while capturing the Republican U.S. Senate nomination by a landslide margin of 26 percentage points.

The super-rich rookie congressman-- dubbed “Perot by the Sea”--lost by two points in Santa Barbara County to a hard-line conservative from Orange County, former Rep. William Dannemeyer.

I quickly learned that the result had much less to do with Dannemeyer than with former Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino, the veteran Republican officeholder and local native whom Huffington had beaten in 1992 soon after moving here with his many millions from Texas.

The Republican party locally is still deeply split over Huffington’s fratricidal ousting of Lagomarsino. And the schism only widened when the newly elected representative announced just eight months after taking office that he would leave the seat to run for the Senate.

“That didn’t set well,” noted Mabel Shults, a Santa Barbara party activist and hotel designer. “He’s been working politically for himself instead of this area.”

Asserted Barney Klinger, a manufacturer and major GOP fund-raiser: “He’s not only done nothing as a congressman, he lied. He said he’d stay in the office for three (two-year) terms.”

Klinger now is organizing a $500,000 fund-raiser for Huffington’s Democratic opponent, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

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To get Huffington’s side, I went to his local congressional office--in one of those typical light stucco buildings with a red-tile roof--and began asking questions. You’d have thought I had a contagious disease.

“You’ll have to call the campaign office,” I was told.

I’d already called and was told by the candidate’s state campaign manager, Bob Schuman, that “it’s not a big deal” because Santa Barbarans also had rejected Huffington in the 1992 primary; he’d made up for it by carrying adjacent San Luis Obispo County. “There’s still some residual Lagomarsino loyalty. That’s all.”

But Huffington has been representing Santa Barbara in Congress since the last election and should have been able to build up his support. I wanted to know what he’d done for the county. “We don’t have that,” said his district representative, Angeles Perez.

How about the name of a supporter I could talk to? Another aide pointed to a woman in a chair and said she was a local GOP official. I asked the woman if I could talk to her. She ducked out the door and sped off in her car.

Perez wrote down the phone number of another woman but wouldn’t let me call her from the office. That would be mixing politics with congressional business, she said. “There’s probably a pay phone somewhere on State Street.”

I found one and called Marian Koonce, who owns rental properties and once backed Lagomarsino but switched to Huffington in 1992. “I see Michael as a shining star, a comer,” she said.

Asked what Huffington had done for the county, Koonce told me of a case where he had helped obtain a green card for the daughter of one of her tenants, an immigrant farmer.

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Koonce herself brought up probably the most controversial case involving Huffington--his refusal to help Raytheon Corp., one of Santa Barbara’s biggest employers, obtain State Department permission to sell $100 million worth of shipboard missile defense systems to Taiwan. “He has an aversion to helping companies with armaments,” she said.

Astonished, Raytheon turned to Feinstein, who quickly went to bat for the company.

Huffington later explained to a Times reporter, “I’m not going to be a paid or unpaid lobbyist for any company. That’s not my job. I represent everyone equally.”

That clearly is a new concept in representing your constituents in Washington.

Huffington likes to say he is not “beholden” to any special interest because he refuses PAC contributions. With an oil fortune estimated at $70 million, he can afford to finance his own campaigns and does--spending $5.2 million to win the House seat and expecting to write checks for at least $15 million in this Senate race.

I drove down the coast, past Montecito where Huffington has his $4.3-million mansion, all the way to Solimar near Ventura. There, I found Lagomarsino at his beach house.

He’s now 67, tanned and relaxed--but still bitter. Recently, he handed over to the Feinstein campaign two boxes of Huffington research material.

Huffington’s race could be a classic: Can a rich newcomer with almost no political base or record buy himself a U.S. Senate seat?